Armed in Her Fashion

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

It was a leaden morning with a weak sun, and nothing to eat but the last crumbs of the oat bread. But even Hell needed water like any other animal, it seemed. Margriet and Beatrix found a stream not far away and splashed their faces and drank. Beatrix seemed leaden, too. Margriet had never seen her daughter’s face so weighed down, so pallid. Every freckle stood out like a star in the sky.

It could be the Grief.

But then they had not slept, had not eaten. She had taken the death of her husband hard. As well she might; she was young, and believed she loved Baltazar. No one could mourn properly now, now that the dead were not gone entirely.

“Will you manage a little longer?” Margriet asked, in her softest voice, as Beatrix came back from pissing behind a boulder.

Perhaps she should have agreed to the escort the king offered, but it had felt like another captivity. It was daylight, and the abbey was not far.

Beatrix nodded. “On top of everything, it’s my time of the month.”

“Have you got enough clouts? I brought a few.”

“I’ll be all right for now.”

When all this was over Margriet would buy her daughter a leg of roast pork and white bread, and a soft bed to sleep in. Six days, and then they would have enough for Beatrix to start a life somewhere safe.

“Well,” Margriet said, shouldering her bundle, “the road is just down that slope, and we follow it eastwise a few hours, and we’ll hit Zonnebeke Abbey. A fine abbey with a good reputation, or it was.”

Some of the richer bishops fought alongside Philippe in his dirty wars; allies of Philippe might not be allies of the Chatelaine but would they protect the people in their guesthouse, if the chimeras came sniffing around? If there were revenants at the gate?

Beatrix took her arm. “Wait.”

“What?”

“Something moving on the road. Isn’t there? Can you see it?”

Margriet squinted. “I think so. The road will take them quite close to us, where it bends. Let’s bide here a moment. Do they look like people?”

“People, or chimeras. I can’t tell at this distance. And they are leading a small horse.”

They made their way to a rock and crouched.

“A strange time to be travelling,” Beatrix whispered, watching the figures approaching. “Not chimeras. Can you see, Mother? A man with a slight limp, and a woman, and a child of about ten. Two young women. An old man and an old woman. And a pack nag laden with a few pots and blankets.”

“I suspect they’re making their way to safety,” Mother said. “Heading north, to the sea. To Dunkirk, probably, and a ship.”

Where she and Beatrix would go, in a week’s time, if all went well.

“Surely they are fleeing the Chatelaine, and not in league with her. Should I wave? They have kind faces. Perhaps they have food to share.”

Margriet put her hand on her daughter’s arm.

“They have their business and we have ours.”

By the time the travelers were out of sight, Margriet’s knees were sore and prickled from the stubbly ground and she was sick of the scent and sight of sun-cooked rock in her face.

Beatrix was lying down in the grass, curled around her distaff, her eyes closed.

“Let’s rest for a bit,” Margriet said.

“I can get up,” Beatrix said, opening an eye. “I don’t mind.”

“You sleep, and I’ll keep watch. I’ll wake you at noon.”

Beatrix closed her eyes and wondered what the travelers would encounter on the road, whether they would make it safely to Dunkirk. Would this land always be burnt and bloody? Would there ever be peace in Flanders?

Her drifting thoughts showed her two enormous eyes, perfectly round, flat circles of glass bounded in rings of metal.

She knew they were eyes because they were in a face of a kind, a hideous face of rumpled brown cloth, with no real nose or mouth. Instead there was a bit more brownish metal at the chin and from there, a long pale snake drooped down to the person’s chest—for yes, this was a person, she saw now, wearing a war helmet like that of a man-at-arms.

A chimera, then?

Those eyes. Those glass eyes packed with reflections of Beatrix. Those eyes so round, so lidless, and so huge they hardly left any room for the rest of the face.

Was this the weapon she ought to use against her husband? A chimera of her own?

“God,” she whispered, “I see the pictures but I do not understand.”

Hands on her shoulders. She opened her eyes but saw nothing but darkness, and in the darkness the gleam of two round, flat glass eyes.

“Let go,” Mother said. And then she was pulling the distaff, wrenching it out of her hands.

“No!” Beatrix shouted, and yanked the distaff back. She could still see nothing but the face, the glass eyes. She heard her mother fall backwards.

Beatrix dropped the distaff.

The vision faded. It was night, but she could see now the true world, lit by moonlight.

“Is it late?” she whispered.

“I fell asleep,” Mother grumbled, raising herself up onto hands and knees, awkwardly, then standing. “I only woke now because you were having a nightmare. I thought you were going to stab your eye with that thing, the way you were waving it around.”

Beatrix looked down at the distaff.

“I know you think I have the Grief,” she said, slowly, carefully, leaving no spaces between her words for Mother to jump in. “But I think it’s the distaff. I think it … shows me things. And helps me … call things.”

Margriet picked it up, peered at it in the moonlight, as if she could see some sign of evil upon it. “Always?”

Beatrix shook her head. “Just since we left Bruges.”

Mother turned it over and over. “The Nix fished it out of the water. Wasn’t he babbling about wishes? What did you tell him?”

Beatrix shook her head. “Nothing. But I was thinking—”

“What?”

She hoped Mother could not see her blush. “I was thinking that I wanted to see Baltazar again, that I wished I could call him to me, or get some word of him that night, and that I could know what would happen to us.”

Margriet shrugged. “So the old sea-snake did have the power after all, but of course he botched it. I’ll throttle him! So you—wait. You did call Baltazar, then.”

“She did.”

Baltazar’s voice.

He stood, a little distance away, the blood still caked on one side of his head like a shadow, like a trick of the moonlight.

Mother held the distaff out as if it were a pike. “Come no further. I’ll put a hole in you.”

She turned to Beatrix, and then a smile broke on her face. Mother shut her eyes tight and thrust the distaff out, pointing it with so much force that her hands shook and it slipped out of her grasp for a moment before she recovered it. It was almost funny to see her trying so desperately to use the distaff to control Baltazar.

But Baltazar only stared at Beatrix. He made no movement.

“I suffer,” he whispered. “It is a terrible suffering, Beatrix, to be without you at the end.”

“The end of what?” she asked, and the air was cold on her skin.

“The end of everything that does not matter.”

He reached out his hand. It was, though it was pale, still her husband’s hand. The fingers she had watched, in secret, as he set Father’s scales or counted out tally sticks. Baltazar had always had a nimble brain and nimble fingers.

She touched those fingers now. Though they were cold, they were still quick; he grasped her hand and took a step toward her.

She could see another kind of vision now. It was very different from the distaff magic, and more real, more warm and true. Like a memory of a thing that has already happened, not a strange sight seen through a glass darkly. This vision was of Beatrix and Baltazar, walking together into warm red halls, hand in hand, with silent joy too powerful to be contained in laughter rising in their breasts.

This was what would be, what must be. She would never be cold again, or hungry, or afraid. How could she have been so foolish?

She stepped forward and her husband stepped forward, too.

The sharp end of the distaff in her ribs.

“Get away from him,” Mother yelled. “You cannot have her. Beatrix, you, too. Get away.”

She was not a girl now, to be told to keep her hands off her husband.

She turned to tell Mother so, and saw the terror in Mother’s face.

Mother let the distaff drop.

“What will you come back for, Beatrix?” she sobbed. “If you go with him, if you feed yourself to the Beast. What desire will haunt you? Will you be satisfied with him? Will you both be satisfied in Hell? Or is it the nature of a revenant to come back? Are you certain that you have no other desire than your husband on this earth, that nothing else will pull you out here into the world at night to walk and moan?”

Beatrix’s stomach lurched and she dropped Baltazar’s hand.

Margriet thrust the distaff at her.

“Do what you must,” she said.

Beatrix grasped the distaff and pointed it at Baltazar. It shook even worse in her own hands than it had in Margriet’s.

Baltazar took a step back, stumbled, but did not walk away. She was glad of it, glad that at least she could still look on his beautiful face—no! She must send him away, for now at least, so she could think. She needed to think.

She closed her eyes but she could not will it. She could not stand to watch her dead husband watch her, not for a moment more, and yet she could not send him away.

But she could call … what? Fireflies, and what else? What had she asked the Nix for? What could save her from this?

She moved her right hand along to grip the distaff at the middle and pressed the heel of her left hand to her temple, pressing against the inside corners of her eyes to try to concentrate. Before her eyes she saw again the vision of the horrible face of cloth and glass and metal. She heard a sound like breathing, maybe her own.

The golden metal around the unseeing glass eyes now widened and brightened until she was looking at two round yellow irises, with a great frowning silver brow pressing down between them, and these eyes were seeing eyes but they were not caring eyes. They were as impassive as judgement, as alert as the sun, completely round and open, with round black pupils within them.

The eyes of an owl.

It arrived in utter silence, so the first sound Beatrix heard was the sound of a talon scraping through flesh. She opened her eyes and saw her husband with a dark gash in his head, but the gash did not bleed. And Baltazar did not cry out, because a corpse felt no pain, but he looked to the sky, and crouched and held his arms over his head.

She could not send away her husband, not tonight, but she could harry him. A fine wife she made.

“Now,” Margriet said, and she pulled Beatrix away.

They stumbled and ran, and it was not until Beatrix had stifled several sobs that she realized they were running in the wrong direction.

“The abbey—” she panted.

Mother shook her head, and slowed to a walk, her hand at her side. She turned, still walking, and peered behind them.

“Do you see him?” she hissed.

Beatrix turned, too, almost daring to hope, but he was not there.

“I won’t take you somewhere he can find you. Come on. Ypres can’t be too far north of here, if my reckoning is good.”